Gene Phillips was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 jump blues

Jump blues

Jump blues is an up-tempo blues usually played by small groups and featuring horns. It was very popular in the 1940s, and the movement was a precursor to the arrival of rhythm and blues and rock and roll...

 guitarist

Guitarist

A guitarist is a musician who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar while singing.- Versatility :The guitarist controls an extremely...

 and singer.

He was influenced by, and a fan of, Louis Jordan

Louis Jordan

Louis Thomas Jordan was a pioneering American jazz, blues and rhythm & blues musician, songwriter and bandleader who enjoyed his greatest popularity from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox", Jordan was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the...

, Wynonie Harris

Wynonie Harris

Wynonie Harris , born in Omaha, Nebraska, was an American blues shouter and rhythm and blues singer of upbeat songs, featuring humorous, often ribald lyrics. With fifteen Top 10 hits between 1946 and 1952, Harris is generally considered one of rock and roll's forerunners, influencing Elvis Presley...

, Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...

 and Count Basie

Count Basie

William "Count" Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. Basie led his jazz orchestra almost continuously for nearly 50 years...

, Big Joe Turner

Big Joe Turner

Big Joe Turner was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. According to the songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him." Although he came to his greatest fame in the 1950s with his pioneering rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and...

 and Jimmy Rushing

Jimmy Rushing

James Andrew Rushing , known as Jimmy Rushing, was an American blues shouter and swing jazz singer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, best known as the featured vocalist of Count Basie's Orchestra from 1935 to 1948.Rushing was known as "Mr...

.

Career

He joined the St Louis bands of Dewey Jackson

Dewey Jackson

Dewey Jackson was an American jazz trumpeter and cornetist.Jackson began playing professionally at an early age, with the Odd Fellows Boys' Band , Tommy Evans , and George Reynolds's Keystone Band. He played with Charlie Creath on riverboats, and then led his own Golden Melody Band from 1920 to 1923...

 and Jimmy Powell and was later taught lap steel guitar

Steel guitar

Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use...

 by Floyd Smith

Floyd Smith (musician)

Floyd Smith was an American jazz guitarist.Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Smith studied music theory as a teenager and leared ukelele as a child before taking up guitar...

. He later went on to join Lorenzo Flennoy's Trio.

In late 1945 he recorded with Lucky Thompson

Lucky Thompson

Eli "Lucky" Thompson was a United States jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist...

 in a band also featuring Marshall Royal

Marshall Royal

Marshall Royal was an American clarinettist and alto saxophonist best known for his work with Count Basie, with whose band he played for nearly twenty years....

 and Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music...

.

His Rhythm Aces, the band he used on his Modern

Modern Records

Modern Records was an American record label formed in 1945 in Los Angeles by the Bihari brothers. In the 1960s, Modern Records went bankrupt and ceased operations, but the catalogue went with the management into what became Kent Records. This back catalogue was eventually licensed to the UK label...

 recordings for the Bihari Brothers

Bihari brothers

The Bihari Brothers, Lester, Jules, Saul and Joe, were American music entrepreneurs and the founders of Modern Records in Los Angeles and its subsidiaries such as Meteor Records based in Memphis.-Origins:...

, included Jake Porter

Jake Porter

Jake Vernon Haven Porter was an American jazz trumpeter and record producer.Porter started playing violin at age seven and switched to cornet at nine...

, trumpet; drummer Al "Cake" Wichard

Al "Cake" Wichard

Al "Cake" Wichard, born Albert Wichard, was an American blues and jazz drummer, especially active as a recording artist in the late 1940s. Little is known about Wichard except that he died in the early 1950s.-Biography:...

; Maxwell Davis

Maxwell Davis

Maxwell Davis was an American R&B saxophonist, arranger and record producer.-Biography:Davis was born in Independence, Kansas. In 1937 he moved to Los Angeles, California, playing saxophone in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra...

, Marshall Royal

Marshall Royal

Marshall Royal was an American clarinettist and alto saxophonist best known for his work with Count Basie, with whose band he played for nearly twenty years....

, Jack McVea

Jack McVea

Jack McVea was an American swing, blues, and rhythm and blues woodwind player; he played clarinet and tenor and baritone saxophone...

, Bumps Meyers, Willard McDaniel, Lloyd Glenn

Lloyd Glenn

Lloyd Glenn was an American R&B pianist, bandleader and arranger, who was a pioneer of the "West Coast" blues style.-Career:...

, Bill Street and Art Edwards.

Some sources claim Phillips died in 1990.

External links

• Partial discography